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• html5 vs flash - full comparison chart anywhere?

  - by iddqd

  So since Steve Jobs said Flash sucks and implied that HTML5 can do everything Flash can without the need for a Plugin, I keep hearing those exact words from a lot of People. I would really like to have a Chart somewhere (similar to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_layout_engines_%28HTML5%29#Form_elements_and_attributes ) that I can just show to those people. Showing all the little things that Flash can do right now, that HTML5/Ajax/CSS is not yet even thinking about. But of course also the things that HTML5 does better. I would like to see details compared like audio playback, realtime audio processing, byte level access, bitmap data manipulation, webcam access, binary sockets, stuff in the works such as P2P technology (adobe stratus) and all the stuff I don't know about myself. Ideally with examples of what can be accomplished with, lets say Binary Sockets (such as a POP3 client) because otherwise it won't mean a lot to non-programmers since they will just say "well we can do without Binary Sockets". And ideally with some current benchmarks and some examples of websites that use this technology. I've searched the web and am surprised not to find anything. So is there such a comparison somewhere? Or does anybody want to create this and post it to Wikipedia? ;-)

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• NullReferenceException when initializing NServiceBus within web application Application_Start method

  - by SteveBering

  I am running the 2.0 RTM of NServiceBus and am getting a NullReferenceException when my MessageModule binds the CurrentSessionContext to my NHibernate sessionfactory. From within my Application_Start, I call the following method: public static void WithWeb(IUnityContainer container) { log4net.Config.XmlConfigurator.Configure(); var childContainer = container.CreateChildContainer(); childContainer.RegisterInstance<ISessionFactory>(NHibernateSession.SessionFactory); var bus = NServiceBus.Configure.WithWeb() .UnityBuilder(childContainer) .Log4Net() .XmlSerializer() .MsmqTransport() .IsTransactional(true) .PurgeOnStartup(false) .UnicastBus() .ImpersonateSender(false) .LoadMessageHandlers() .CreateBus(); var activeBus = bus.Start(); container.RegisterInstance(typeof(IBus), activeBus); } When the bus is started, my message module starts with the following: public void HandleBeginMessage() { try { CurrentSessionContext.Bind(_sessionFactory.OpenSession()); } catch (Exception e) { _log.Error("Error occurred in HandleBeginMessage of NHibernateMessageModule", e); throw; } } In looking at my log, we are logging the following error when the bind method is called: System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at NHibernate.Context.WebSessionContext.GetMap() at NHibernate.Context.MapBasedSessionContext.set_Session(ISession value) at NHibernate.Context.CurrentSessionContext.Bind(ISession session) Apparently, there is some issue in getting access to the HttpContext. Should this call to configure NServiceBus occur later in the lifecycle than Application_Start? Or is there another workaround that others have used to get handlers working within an Asp.NET Web application? Thanks, Steve

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• sorl-thumbnail unit tests fail by 1 pixel (!)

  - by stevejalim

  Hi I'm using sorl-thumbnail in a Django 1.2 (currently 1.2 RC) project and getting a surprising failure of four of sorl's built-in unit tests. Essentially, the resized images are all 1px shorter than the unit tests expect them to be. See below for details I'm developing on OSX 10.5.8 (not Snow Leopard) with Python 2.5.1 (r251:54863, Feb 6 2009, 19:02:12) and PIL 1.1.6. Any thoughts what might be up? Cheers Steve ====================================================================== FAIL: test_extension (sorl.thumbnail.tests.fields.FieldTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/fields.py", line 66, in test_extension self.verify_thumbnail((50, 37), thumb, expected_filename) File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/base.py", line 92, in verify_thumbnail self.assertEqual(image.size, expected_size) AssertionError: (50, 38) != (50, 37) ====================================================================== FAIL: test_thumbnail (sorl.thumbnail.tests.fields.ImageWithThumbnailsFieldTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/fields.py", line 111, in test_thumbnail self.verify_thumbnail((50, 37), thumb, expected_filename) File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/base.py", line 92, in verify_thumbnail self.assertEqual(image.size, expected_size) AssertionError: (50, 38) != (50, 37) ====================================================================== FAIL: testTag (sorl.thumbnail.tests.templatetags.ThumbnailTagTest) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Traceback (most recent call last): File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/templatetags.py", line 118, in testTag self.verify_thumbnail((90, 67), expected_filename=expected_fn) File "/usr/local/django/myprojectnamehere/lib/sorl/thumbnail/tests/base.py", line 92, in verify_thumbnail self.assertEqual(image.size, expected_size) AssertionError: (90, 68) != (90, 67)

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• How reliable is Verify() in Moq?

  - by matthewayinde

  I'm only new to Unit Testing and ASP.NET MVC. I've been trying to get my head into both using Steve Sanderson's "Pro ASP.NET MVC Framework". In the book there is this piece of code: public class AdminController : Controller { ... [AcceptVerbs(HttpVerbs.Post)] public ActionResult Edit(Product product, HttpPostedFileBase image) { ... productsRepository.SaveProduct(product); TempData["message"] = product.Name + " has been saved."; return RedirectToAction("Index"); } } That he tests like so: [Test] public void Edit_Action_Saves_Product_To_Repository_And_Redirects_To_Index() { // Arrange AdminController controller = new AdminController(mockRepos.Object); Product newProduct = new Product(); // Act var result = (RedirectToRouteResult)controller.Edit(newProduct, null); // Assert: Saved product to repository and redirected mockRepos.Verify(x => x.SaveProduct(newProduct)); Assert.AreEqual("Index", result.RouteValues["action"]); } THE TEST PASSES. So I intensionally corrupt the code by adding "productsRepository.DeleteProduct(product);" after the "SaveProduct(product);" as in: ... productsRepository.SaveProduct(product); productsRepository.DeleteProduct(product); ... THE TEST PASSES.(i.e Condones a calamitous [hypnosis + intellisense]-induced typo :) ) Could this test be written better? Or is there something I should know? Thanks a lot.

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• Converter problem with XmlDataProvider

  - by Andrew

  Sorry for this, I've just started programming with wpf. I can't seem to figure out why the following xaml displays "System.Xml.XmlElement" instead of the actual xml node content. This is displayed 5 times in the listbox whenever I run it. Not sure where I'm going wrong... <Window x:Class="TestBinding.Window1" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300"> <Window.Resources> <XmlDataProvider x:Key="myXmlSource" XPath="/root"> <x:XData> <root xmlns=""> <name>Steve</name> <name>Arthur</name> <name>Sidney</name> <name>Billy</name> <name>Steven</name> </root> </x:XData> </XmlDataProvider> <DataTemplate x:Key="shmooga"> <TextBlock Text="{Binding}"/> </DataTemplate> </Window.Resources> <Grid> <ListBox ItemTemplate="{StaticResource shmooga}" ItemsSource="{Binding Source={StaticResource myXmlSource}, XPath=name}"> </ListBox> </Grid> </Window> Any help would be very much appreciated. Thanks!

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• maintaining continuous count in php

  - by LiveEn

  I have a small problem maintain a count for the position. i have written a function function that will select all the users within a page and positions them in the order. Eg: Mike Position 1 Steve Postion 2.............. .... Jacob Position 30 but the problem that i have when i move to the second page, the count is started from first Eg: Jenny should be number 31 but the list goes, Jenny Position 1 Tanya Position 2....... Below is my function function nrk($duty,$page,$position) { $url="http://www.test.com/people.php?q=$duty&start=$page"; $ch=curl_init(); curl_setopt($ch,CURLOPT_URL,$url); $result=curl_exec($ch); $dom = new DOMDocument(); @$dom->loadHTML($result); $xpath=new DOMXPath($dom); $elements = $xpath->evaluate("//div"); foreach ($elements as $element) { $name = $element->getElementsByTagName("name")->item(0)->nodeValue; $position=$position+1; echo $name." Position:".$position."<br>"; } return $position; } Below is the for loop where i try to loop thru the page count for ($page=0;$page<=$pageNumb;$page=$page + 10) { nrk($duty,$page,$position); } I dont want to maintain a array key value in the for each coz i drop certain names...

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• How can I create a horizontal table in a single foreach loop in MVC?

  - by GenericTypeTea

  Is there any way, in ASP.Net MVC, to condense the following code to a single foreach loop? <table class="table"> <tr> <td> Name </td> <% foreach (var item in Model) { %> <td> <%= item.Name %> </td> <% } %> </tr> <tr> <td> Item </td> <% foreach (var item in Model) { %> <td> <%= item.Company %> </td> <% } %> </tr> </table> Where model is a simple object: public class SomeObject { public virtual Name {get;set;} public virtual Company {get;set;} } This would output a table as follows: Name | Bob | Sam | Bill | Steve | Company | Builder | Fireman | MS | Apple | I know I could probably use an extension method to write out each row, but is it possible to build all rows using a single iteration over the model? This is a follow on from this question as I'm unhappy with my accepted answer and cannot believe I've provided the best solution.

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• Simple Database normalization question...

  - by user365531

  Hi all, I have a quick question regarding a database that I am designing and making sure it is normalized... I have a customer table, with a primary key of customerId. It has a StatusCode column that has a code which reflects the customers account status ie. 1 = Open, 2 = Closed, 3 = Suspended etc... Now I would like to have another field in the customer table that flags whether the account is allowed to be suspended or not... certain customers will be automatically suspended if they break there trading terms... others not... so the relevant table fields will be as so: Customers (CustomerId(PK):StatusCode:IsSuspensionAllowed) Now both fields are dependent on the primary key as you can not determine the status or whether suspensions are allowed on a particular customer unless you know the specific customer, except of course when the IsSuspensionAllowed field is set to YES, the the customer should never have a StatusCode of 3 (Suspended). It seems from the above table design it is possible for this to happen unless a check contraint is added to my table. I can't see how another table could be added to the relational design to enforce this though as it's only in the case where IsSuspensionAllowed is set to YES and StatusCode is set to 3 when the two have a dependence on each other. So after my long winded explanation my question is this: Is this a normalization problem and I'm not seeing a relational design that will enforce this... or is it actually just a business rule that should be enforced with a check contraint and the table is in fact still normalized. Cheers, Steve

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• Moving from SVN to HG : branching and backup

  - by rorycl

  My company runs svn right now and we are very familiar with it. However, because we do a lot of concurrent development, merging can become very complicated.. We've been playing with hg and we really like the ability to make fast and effective clones on a per-feature basis. We've got two main issues we'd like to resolve before we move to hg: Branches for erstwhile svn users I'm familiar with the "4 ways to branch in Mercurial" as set out in Steve Losh's article. We think we should "materialise" the branches because I think the dev team will find this the most straightforward way of migrating from svn. Consequently I guess we should follow the "branching with clones" model which means that separate clones for branches are made on the server. While this means that every clone/branch needs to be made on the server and published separately, this isn't too much of an issue for us as we are used to checking out svn branches which come down as separate copies. I'm worried, however, that merging changes and following history may become difficult between branches in this model. Backup If programmers in our team make local clones of a branch, how do they backup the local clone? We're used to seeing svn commit messages like this on a feature branch "Interim commit: db function not yet working". I can't see a way of doing this easily in hg. Advice gratefully received. Rory

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• Why doesn't the Java Collections API include a Graph implementation?

  - by dvanaria

  I’m currently learning the Java Collections API and feel I have a good understanding of the basics, but I’ve never understood why this standard API doesn’t include a Graph implementation. The three base classes are easily understandable (List, Set, and Map) and all their implementations in the API are mostly straightforward and consistent. Considering how often graphs come up as a potential way to model a given problem, this just doesn’t make sense to me (it’s possible it does exist in the API and I’m not looking in the right place of course). Steve Yegge suggests in one of his blog posts that a programmer should consider graphs first when attacking a problem, and if the problem domain doesn’t fit naturally into this data structure, only then consider the alternative structures. My first guess is that there is no universal way to represent graphs, or that their interfaces may not be generic enough for an API implementation to be useful? But if you strip down a graph to its basic components (vertices and a set of edges that connect some or all of the vertices) and consider the ways that graphs are commonly constructed (methods like addVertex(v) and insertEdge(v1, v2)) it seems that a generic Graph implementation would be possible and useful. Thanks for helping me understand this better.

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• Prohibit ampersand in Rails form

  - by snlsn

  NOT a Rails 3 issue In a Contact model I have a company_name attribute. For reasons that don't matter to this question, I want to prohibit an ampersand character. We have a lot of clients with ampersands in their company name, and users forget they aren't allowed to use this character. This isn't an html sanitize issue. I don't care about whitespace or CDATA or anything. The entries in this field are plain text and I don't want an ampersand to be entered in this one field in any way, shape or form. I assume a validation on the model is the way to go. I have tried validates_exclusion_of. I have tried validates_format_of. No success. I'm unsophisticated when it comes to regex, so I might be doing things very wrong. But the bottom line is - I need to prevent a user from entering that "&" character in the company_name field. Thanks a million. Steve

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• Appending an existing XML file with c#

  - by Farstucker

  I have an existing XML file that I would like to append without changing the format. Existing File looks like this: <Clients> <User username="farstucker"> <UserID>1</UserID> <DOB /> <FirstName>Steve</FirstName> <LastName>Lawrence</LastName> <Location>NYC</Location> </User> </Clients> How can I add another user using this format? My existing code is: string fileLocation = "clients.xml"; XmlTextWriter writer; if (!File.Exists(fileLocation)) { writer = new XmlTextWriter(fileLocation, null); writer.WriteStartDocument(); // Write the Root Element writer.WriteStartElement("Clients"); // End Element and Close writer.WriteEndElement(); writer.Close(); } // Append new data here Ive thought about using XmlDocument Fragment to append the data but Im not certain if I can maintain the existing format ( and empty tags ) without messing up the file. Any advice you could give is much appreciated. EDIT Ive changed the code to read the original XML but the file keeps getting overwritten.

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• find consecutive nonzero values

  - by thymeandspace

  I am trying to write a simple MATLAB program that will find the first chain (more than 70) of consecutive nonzero values and return the starting value of that consecutive chain. I am working with movement data from a joystick and there are a few thousand rows of data with a mix of zeros and nonzero values before the actual trial begins (coming from subjects slightly moving the joystick before the trial actually started). I need to get rid of these rows before I can start analyzing the movement from the trials. I am sure this is a relatively simple thing to do so I was hoping someone could offer insight. Thank you in advance -Lilly EDIT: Here's what I tried: s = zeros(size(x1)); for i=2:length(x1) if(x1(i-1) ~= 0) s(i) = 1 + s(i-1); end end display(S); for a vector x1 which has a max chain of 72 but I dont know how to find the max chain and return its first value, so I know where to trim. I also really don't think this is the best strategy, since the max chain in my data will be tens of thousands of values. Thanks for helping me edit, Steve. :)

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• Can a lambda can be used to change a List's values in-place ( without creating a new list)?

  - by Saint Hill

  I am trying to determine the correct way of transforming all the values in a List using the new lambdas feature in the upcoming release of Java 8 without creating a **new** List. This pertains to times when a List is passed in by a caller and needs to have a function applied to change all the contents to a new value. For example, the way Collections.sort(list) changes a list in-place. What is the easiest way given this transforming function and this starting list: String function(String s){ return [some change made to value of s]; } List<String> list = Arrays.asList("Bob", "Steve", "Jim", "Arbby"); The usual way of applying a change to all the values in-place was this: for (int i = 0; i < list.size(); i++) { list.set(i, function( list.get(i) ); } Does lambdas and Java 8 offer: an easier and more expressive way? a way to do this without setting up all the scaffolding of the for(..) loop?

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• nginx can't see MySQL

  - by user135235

  I have a fully working Joomla 2.5.6 install driven by a local MySQL server, but I'd like to test nginx to see if it's a faster web serving experience than Apache. \ PHP 5.4.6 (PHP54w) \ CentOS 6.2 \ Joomla 2.5.6 \ PHP54w-fpm.i386 (FastCGI process manager) \ php -m shows: mysql & mysqli modules loaded Nginx seems to have installed fine via yum, it can process a PHP-info file via FastCGI perfectly OK (http://37.128.190.241/php.php) but when I stop Apache, start nginx instead and visit my site I get: "Database connection error (1): The MySQL adapter 'mysqli' is not available." I've tried adjusting my Joomla configuration.php to use mysql instead of mysqli but I get the same basic error, only this time "Database connection error (1): The MySQL adapter 'mysql' is not available" of course! Can anyone think what the problem might be please? I did try explicitly setting extension = mysqli.so and extension = mysql.so in my php.ini to try and force the issue (despite php -m showing they were both successfully loaded anyway) - no difference. I have a pretty standard nginx default.conf: server { listen 80; server_name www.MYDOMAIN.com; server_name_in_redirect off; access_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.access_log main; error_log /var/log/nginx/localhost.error_log info; root /var/www/html/MYROOT_DIR; index index.php index.html index.htm default.html default.htm; # Support Clean (aka Search Engine Friendly) URLs location / { try_files $uri $uri/ /index.php?q=$uri&$args; } # deny running scripts inside writable directories location ~* /(images|cache|media|logs|tmp)/.*\.(php|pl|py|jsp|asp|sh|cgi)$ { return 403; error_page 403 /403_error.html; } location ~ \.php$ { fastcgi_pass 127.0.0.1:9000; fastcgi_index index.php; include fastcgi_params; fastcgi_param SCRIPT_FILENAME $document_root$fastcgi_script_name; include /etc/nginx/fastcgi.conf; } # caching of files location ~* \.(ico|pdf|flv)$ { expires 1y; } location ~* \.(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|swf|xml|txt)$ { expires 14d; } } Snip of output from phpinfo under nginx: Server API FPM/FastCGI Virtual Directory Support disabled Configuration File (php.ini) Path /etc Loaded Configuration File /etc/php.ini Scan this dir for additional .ini files /etc/php.d Additional .ini files parsed /etc/php.d/curl.ini, /etc/php.d/fileinfo.ini, /etc/php.d/json.ini, /etc/php.d/phar.ini, /etc/php.d/zip.ini Snip of output from phpinfo under Apache: Server API Apache 2.0 Handler Virtual Directory Support disabled Configuration File (php.ini) Path /etc Loaded Configuration File /etc/php.ini Scan this dir for additional .ini files /etc/php.d Additional .ini files parsed /etc/php.d/curl.ini, /etc/php.d/fileinfo.ini, /etc/php.d/json.ini, /etc/php.d/mysql.ini, /etc/php.d/mysqli.ini, /etc/php.d/pdo.ini, /etc/php.d/pdo_mysql.ini, /etc/php.d/pdo_sqlite.ini, /etc/php.d/phar.ini, /etc/php.d/sqlite3.ini, /etc/php.d/zip.ini Seems that with Apache, PHP is loading substantially more additional .ini files, including ones relating to mysql (mysql.ini, mysqli.ini, pdo_mysql.ini) than nginx. Any ideas how I get nginix to also call these additional .ini's ? Thanks in advance, Steve

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• Google Chrome and Firefox Rendering

  - by user13503

  When attempting to visit sites running javascript, Google Chrome and Firefox often fail to render them properly. For example, when hitting google.com/codesearch results, I just get a blank page. http://img340.imageshack.us/img340/8527/200910071518.png This rendering problem happens in both browsers on a machine running Windows XP Professional x64. Internet explorer is able to render the page just fine. Also, controls on other pages sometimes fail to respond, for example in Google Docs. Has anyone encountered this issue before in Chrome/Firefox? Do they share a common installation of the V8 javascript engine? I'm baffled by this issue. Here's the source code for the image above that Chrome loads when attempting to retrieve the page: <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd"><html><head><script>function a(c){this.t={};this.tick=function(d,e,b){var f=b?b:(new Date).getTime();this.t[d]=[f,e]};this.tick("start",null,c)}var g=new a;window.jstiming={Timer:a,load:g};try{window.jstiming.pt=window.external.pageT}catch(h){}; </script><title></title><script language="javascript" src="/codesearch/js/CachedFile/F1A2CB189D0FCB1FF201C42BF6A5447C.cache.js"></script></head><body><iframe src="javascript:''" id="__gwt_historyFrame" style="width:0;height:0;border:0"></iframe><script>if(window.jstiming){window.jstiming.a={};window.jstiming.c=1;function k(a,d,f){var b=a.t[d];if(!b)return undefined;b=a.t[d][0];if(f!=undefined)var h=f;else h=a.t.start[0];return b-h}window.jstiming.report=function(a,d,f){var b="";if(window.jstiming.pt){b+="&srt="+window.jstiming.pt;delete window.jstiming.pt}try{if(window.external&&window.external.tran)b+="&tran="+window.external.tran}catch(h){}if(a.b)b+="&"+a.b;var e=a.t,p=e.start,l=[],i=[];for(var c in e)if(!(c=="start"))if(!(c.indexOf("_")==0)){var j= e[c][1];if(j)e[j]&&i.push(c+"."+k(a,c,e[j][0]));else p&&l.push(c+"."+k(a,c))}delete e.start;if(d)for(var m in d)b+="&"+m+"="+d[m];var n=[f?f:"http://csi.gstatic.com/csi","?v=3","&s="+(window.jstiming.sn?window.jstiming.sn:"codesearch")+"&action=",a.name,i.length?"&it="+i.join(",")+b:b,"&rt=",l.join(",")].join(""),g=new Image,o=window.jstiming.c++;window.jstiming.a[o]=g;g.onload=g.onerror=function(){delete window.jstiming.a[o]};g.src=n;g=null;return n}}; </script></body></html> Thanks, Steve

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• May 20th Links: ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET, .NET 4, VS 2010, Silverlight

  - by ScottGu

  Here is the latest in my link-listing series.  Also check out my VS 2010 and .NET 4 series and ASP.NET MVC 2 series for other on-going blog series I’m working on. [In addition to blogging, I am also now using Twitter for quick updates and to share links. Follow me at: twitter.com/scottgu] ASP.NET MVC How to Localize an ASP.NET MVC Application: Michael Ceranski has a good blog post that describes how to localize ASP.NET MVC 2 applications. ASP.NET MVC with jTemplates Part 1 and Part 2: Steve Gentile has a nice two-part set of blog posts that demonstrate how to use the jTemplate and DataTable jQuery libraries to implement client-side data binding with ASP.NET MVC. CascadingDropDown jQuery Plugin for ASP.NET MVC: Raj Kaimal has a nice blog post that demonstrates how to implement a dynamically constructed cascading dropdownlist on the client using jQuery and ASP.NET MVC. How to Configure VS 2010 Code Coverage for ASP.NET MVC Unit Tests: Visual Studio enables you to calculate the “code coverage” of your unit tests.  This measures the percentage of code within your application that is exercised by your tests – and can give you a sense of how much test coverage you have.  Gunnar Peipman demonstrates how to configure this for ASP.NET MVC projects. Shrinkr URL Shortening Service Sample: A nice open source application and code sample built by Kazi Manzur that demonstrates how to implement a URL Shortening Services (like bit.ly) using ASP.NET MVC 2 and EF4.  More details here. Creating RSS Feeds in ASP.NET MVC: Damien Guard has a nice post that describes a cool new “FeedResult” class he created that makes it easy to publish and expose RSS feeds from within ASP.NET MVC sites. NoSQL with MongoDB, NoRM and ASP.NET MVC Part 1 and Part 2: Nice two-part blog series by Shiju Varghese on how to use MongoDB (a document database) with ASP.NET MVC.  If you are interested in document databases also make sure to check out the Raven DB project from Ayende. Using the FCKEditor with ASP.NET MVC: Quick blog post that describes how to use FCKEditor – an open source HTML Text Editor – with ASP.NET MVC. ASP.NET Replace Html.Encode Calls with the New HTML Encoding Syntax: Phil Haack has a good blog post that describes a useful way to quickly update your ASP.NET pages and ASP.NET MVC views to use the new <%: %> encoding syntax in ASP.NET 4.  I blogged about the new <%: %> syntax – it provides an easy and concise way to HTML encode content. Integrating Twitter into an ASP.NET Website using OAuth: Scott Mitchell has a nice article that describes how to take advantage of Twiter within an ASP.NET Website using the OAuth protocol – which is a simple, secure protocol for granting API access. Creating an ASP.NET report using VS 2010 Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3: Raj Kaimal has a nice three part set of blog posts that detail how to use SQL Server Reporting Services, ASP.NET 4 and VS 2010 to create a dynamic reporting solution. Three Hidden Extensibility Gems in ASP.NET 4: Phil Haack blogs about three obscure but useful extensibility points enabled with ASP.NET 4. .NET 4 Entity Framework 4 Video Series: Julie Lerman has a nice, free, 7-part video series on MSDN that walks through how to use the new EF4 capabilities with VS 2010 and .NET 4.  I’ll be covering EF4 in a blog series that I’m going to start shortly as well. Getting Lazy with System.Lazy: System.Lazy and System.Lazy<T> are new features in .NET 4 that provide a way to create objects that may need to perform time consuming operations and defer the execution of the operation until it is needed.  Derik Whittaker has a nice write-up that describes how to use it. LINQ to Twitter: Nifty open source library on Codeplex that enables you to use LINQ syntax to query Twitter. Visual Studio 2010 Using Intellitrace in VS 2010: Chris Koenig has a nice 10 minute video that demonstrates how to use the new Intellitrace features of VS 2010 to enable DVR playback of your debug sessions. Make the VS 2010 IDE Colors look like VS 2008: Scott Hanselman has a nice blog post that covers the Visual Studio Color Theme Editor extension – which allows you to customize the VS 2010 IDE however you want. How to understand your code using Dependency Graphs, Sequence Diagrams, and the Architecture Explorer: Jennifer Marsman has a nice blog post describes how to take advantage of some of the new architecture features within VS 2010 to quickly analyze applications and legacy code-bases. How to maintain control of your code using Layer Diagrams: Another great blog post by Jennifer Marsman that demonstrates how to setup a “layer diagram” within VS 2010 to enforce clean layering within your applications.  This enables you to enforce a compiler error if someone inadvertently violates a layer design rule. Collapse Selection in Solution Explorer Extension: Useful VS 2010 extension that enables you to quickly collapse “child nodes” within the Visual Studio Solution Explorer.  If you have deeply nested project structures this extension is useful. Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 Building a Simple Windows Phone 7 Application: A nice tutorial blog post that demonstrates how to take advantage of Expression Blend to create an animated Windows Phone 7 application. If you haven’t checked out my Windows Phone 7 Twitter Tutorial I also recommend reading that. Hope this helps, Scott P.S. If you haven’t already, check out this month’s "Find a Hoster” page on the www.asp.net website to learn about great (and very inexpensive) ASP.NET hosting offers.

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• Guarding against CSRF Attacks in ASP.NET MVC2

  - by srkirkland

  Alongside XSS (Cross Site Scripting) and SQL Injection, Cross-site Request Forgery (CSRF) attacks represent the three most common and dangerous vulnerabilities to common web applications today. CSRF attacks are probably the least well known but they are relatively easy to exploit and extremely and increasingly dangerous. For more information on CSRF attacks, see these posts by Phil Haack and Steve Sanderson. The recognized solution for preventing CSRF attacks is to put a user-specific token as a hidden field inside your forms, then check that the right value was submitted. It's best to use a random value which you’ve stored in the visitor’s Session collection or into a Cookie (so an attacker can't guess the value). ASP.NET MVC to the rescue ASP.NET MVC provides an HTMLHelper called AntiForgeryToken(). When you call <%= Html.AntiForgeryToken() %> in a form on your page you will get a hidden input and a Cookie with a random string assigned. Next, on your target Action you need to include [ValidateAntiForgeryToken], which handles the verification that the correct token was supplied. Good, but we can do better Using the AntiForgeryToken is actually quite an elegant solution, but adding [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] on all of your POST methods is not very DRY, and worse can be easily forgotten. Let's see if we can make this easier on the program but moving from an "Opt-In" model of protection to an "Opt-Out" model. Using AntiForgeryToken by default In order to mandate the use of the AntiForgeryToken, we're going to create an ActionFilterAttribute which will do the anti-forgery validation on every POST request. First, we need to create a way to Opt-Out of this behavior, so let's create a quick action filter called BypassAntiForgeryToken: [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Method, AllowMultiple=false)] public class BypassAntiForgeryTokenAttribute : ActionFilterAttribute { } Now we are ready to implement the main action filter which will force anti forgery validation on all post actions within any class it is defined on: [AttributeUsage(AttributeTargets.Class, AllowMultiple = false)] public class UseAntiForgeryTokenOnPostByDefault : ActionFilterAttribute { public override void OnActionExecuting(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { if (ShouldValidateAntiForgeryTokenManually(filterContext)) { var authorizationContext = new AuthorizationContext(filterContext.Controller.ControllerContext);   //Use the authorization of the anti forgery token, //which can't be inhereted from because it is sealed new ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute().OnAuthorization(authorizationContext); }   base.OnActionExecuting(filterContext); }   /// <summary> /// We should validate the anti forgery token manually if the following criteria are met: /// 1. The http method must be POST /// 2. There is not an existing [ValidateAntiForgeryToken] attribute on the action /// 3. There is no [BypassAntiForgeryToken] attribute on the action /// </summary> private static bool ShouldValidateAntiForgeryTokenManually(ActionExecutingContext filterContext) { var httpMethod = filterContext.HttpContext.Request.HttpMethod;   //1. The http method must be POST if (httpMethod != "POST") return false;   // 2. There is not an existing anti forgery token attribute on the action var antiForgeryAttributes = filterContext.ActionDescriptor.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute), false);   if (antiForgeryAttributes.Length > 0) return false;   // 3. There is no [BypassAntiForgeryToken] attribute on the action var ignoreAntiForgeryAttributes = filterContext.ActionDescriptor.GetCustomAttributes(typeof(BypassAntiForgeryTokenAttribute), false);   if (ignoreAntiForgeryAttributes.Length > 0) return false;   return true; } } The code above is pretty straight forward -- first we check to make sure this is a POST request, then we make sure there aren't any overriding *AntiForgeryTokenAttributes on the action being executed. If we have a candidate then we call the ValidateAntiForgeryTokenAttribute class directly and execute OnAuthorization() on the current authorization context. Now on our base controller, you could use this new attribute to start protecting your site from CSRF vulnerabilities. [UseAntiForgeryTokenOnPostByDefault] public class ApplicationController : System.Web.Mvc.Controller { }   //Then for all of your controllers public class HomeController : ApplicationController {} What we accomplished If your base controller has the new default anti-forgery token attribute on it, when you don't use <%= Html.AntiForgeryToken() %> in a form (or of course when an attacker doesn't supply one), the POST action will throw the descriptive error message "A required anti-forgery token was not supplied or was invalid". Attack foiled! In summary, I think having an anti-CSRF policy by default is an effective way to protect your websites, and it turns out it is pretty easy to accomplish as well. Enjoy!

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• XNA Notes 007

  - by George Clingerman

  Every week I keep wondering if there’s going to be enough activity in the community to keep doing these notes on a weekly basis and every week I’m reminded of just how awesome and active the XNA community is. There’s engines being made, tutorials being created, games being crafted. There’s information being shared, questions being answered and then there’s another whole community around the Xbox LIVE Indie Games themselves. It’s really incredibly to just watch all that’s going on and I’m glad I’m playing a small part in all of this. So here’s what I noticed happening in the XNA community last week. If there’s things I’m missing, always feel free to let me know. I love learning about new corners of the XNA community that I wasn’t aware of or just have been missing! XNA Developers: Uditha Bandara held an XNA Game Development Workshops at Singapore Universities http://uditha.wordpress.com/2011/02/18/xna-game-development-workshops-at-singapore-universities-event-update/ Binary Tweed gives his talks about Indie City and gives his opinion on the false promise of digital distribution http://www.develop-online.net/news/37053/OPINION-The-false-promise-of-digital-distribution Kris Steele posts his Trivia or Die postmortem http://www.krissteele.net/blogdetails.aspx?id=246 @MadNinjaSkills (James Johnston) posts his feelings on testing for XBLIG http://www.ezmuze.co.uk/101 Simon (@DDReaper) posts hints and tips for XNA developers to help get the size of their projects down http://twitter.com/#!/DDReaper/status/38279440924545024 http://xna-uk.net/blogs/darkgenesis/archive/2011/02/17/look-at-the-size-of-that-thing.aspx Michael B. McLaughlin proving why he should be an XNA MVP posts the list of commonly used value types in XNA games http://geekswithblogs.net/mikebmcl/archive/2011/02/17/list-of-commonly-used-value-types-in-xna-games.aspx http://twitter.com/#!/mikebmcl/status/38166541354811392 Paul Powell (@ITSligoPaul) posts about a common sprite batch as a game service http://itspaulsblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/xna-common-sprite-batch-as-game-service.html @SigilXNA (John Defenbaugh) posts his new level editor video for the sequel to Opac’s Journey http://twitter.com/SigilXNA/statuses/36548174373982209 http://twitter.com/#!/SigilXNA/status/36548174373982209 http://youtu.be/QHbmxB_2AW8 @jwatte updates kW Animation for XNA 4.0 http://www.enchantedage.com/xna-animation @DSebJ posts Blender to SunBurn http://twitter.com/#!/DSebJ/status/36564920224976896 http://dsebj.evolvingsoftware.com/?p=187 Ads and WP7 Games - @mechaghost shares his revenue data for his ad based games http://www.occasionalgamer.com/2011/02/09/ads-and-wp7-games/ Xbox LIVE Indie Games (XBLIG): Steven Hurdle posts day 100 of his quest to find a fantastic XBLIG purchase every day http://writingsofmassdeduction.com/2011/02/17/day-100-radiangames-ballistic/ Xbox 360 Indie Game Buying Guide - 12 games for $60 including several Xbox LIVE Indie games! (although if the XNA community was asked we could have recommended 60 games for $60...) http://www.indiegamemag.com/xbox360-indie-games-buying-guide/ The best selling Xbox LIVE Indie games of 2010 http://www.1up.com/news/xbox-live-most-popular-games I’d buy that for a dollar! - the California Literary Review points out a few gems on the XBLIG marketplace (and other places) where you can game on the cheap. http://calitreview.com/14125 Armless Octopus Episode 39 - The Indie Gem Octocast http://www.armlessoctopus.com/2011/02/17/armless-octocast-episode-39-the-indie-gem-octocast/ Ska Studios posts a plethora of updates http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/11/good-morning-gato-49/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/14/vampire-smile-valentines/ http://www.ska-studios.com/2011/02/16/the-dishwasher-vs-finds-a-home/ Kotaku posts about the Xbox LIVE Indie Game that makes you go Pew Pew Pew Pew Pew Pew http://kotaku.com/#!5760632/the-game-that-makes-you-go-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew-pew GameMarx continues to be active and doing a ton for the XBLIG community reviews and Top 5 indie games of the week 2/4-2/10 http://www.gamemarx.com/video/the-show/22/ep-9-february-11-2010.aspx a new podcast Xbox Indie New Releases http://twitter.com/#!/gamemarx/status/36888849107910656 http://www.gamemarx.com/news/2011/02/13/a-new-podcast-xbox-indie-new-releases.aspx @MasterBlud uploads Indocalypse XBLIG Collections #2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uzCZSv075mc&feature=youtu.be&a http://twitter.com/#!/MasterBlud/status/37100029697064960 Just Press Start interviews Michael Hicks from MichaelArts, 18 year old creator of Honor in Vengeance http://justpressstart.net/?p=465 Achievement Locked interviews Kris Steele of FunInfused Games http://xboxindies.wordpress.com/2011/02/11/interview-fun-infused-games/ XNA Game Development: XNA -UK launches their XAP test service to help the XNA community http://xna-uk.net/blogs/news/archive/2011/02/18/xna-uk-xap-test-service-now-live.aspx Transmute shows off a video of the standard character editor http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qqH6gErG948&feature=youtu.be Microsoft Tech Student introduces their first tech student of the month.  Meet Daniel Van Tassel from the University of Utah and learn how he created an Xbox LIVE Indie Game using XNA Studio http://blogs.msdn.com/b/techstudent/archive/2010/12/22/introducing-our-first-tech-student-of-the-month-daniel-van-tassel.aspx XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 3 - Animation (transforms) http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-3-Animation-transforms.aspx XNA for Silverlight Developers Part 4 - Animation (frame based) http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/XNA-for-Silverlight-developers-Part-4-Animation-frame-based.aspx @suhinini tweets about an XNA Sprite Font generation tool http://twitter.com/#!/suhinini/status/36841370131890176 http://www.nubik.com/SpriteFont/ XNATouch 1.5 is out and in it’s words is faster, simpler, more reliable and has the XNA 4.0 API http://monogame.codeplex.com/releases/view/60815 IndieCity is hosting marketing workshops for Indie Developers (UK and US) http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/75197/457654.aspx#457654 New York Students - Learn XNA and Silverlight for Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 http://forums.create.msdn.com/forums/p/72753/456964.aspx#456964 http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewparsons/archive/2011/01/13/learn-to-build-your-own-games-for-xbox-360-and-windows-phone-7.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/andrewparsons/archive/2011/01/13/build-a-game-in-48-hours-win-a-kinect-or-windows-phone-7.aspx Extra Credits: Videogame Music http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/extra-credits/2019-Videogame-Music Steve Pavlina posts an article with useful information for all XNA/XBLIG developers http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2011/02/completion-vs-perfection/

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• Framework 4 Features: Summary of Security enhancements

  - by Anthony Shorten

  In the last log entry I mentioned one of the new security features in Oracle Utilities Application Framework 4.0.1. Security is one of the major "tent poles" (to borrow a phrase from Steve Jobs) in this release of the framework. There are a number of security related enhancements requested by customers and as a result of internal reviews that we have introduced. Here is a summary of some of the security enchancements we have added in this release: Security Cache Changes - Security authorization information is automatically cached on the server for performance reasons (security is checked for every single call the product makes for all modes of access). Prior to this release the cache auto-refreshed every 30 minutes (or so). This has beem made more nimble by supporting a cache refresh every minute (or so). This means authorization changes are reflected quicker than before. Business Level security - Business Services are configurable services that are based upon Application Services. Typically, the business service inherited its security profile from its parent service. Whilst this is sufficient for most needs, it is now required to further specify security on the Business Service definition itself. This will allow granular security and allow the same application service to be exposed as different Business Services with their own security. This is particularly useful when you base a Business Service on a query zone. User Propogation - As with other client server applications, the database connections are pooled and shared as needed. This means that a common database user is used to access the database from the pool to allow sharing. Unfortunently, this means that tracability at the database level is that much harder. In Oracle Utilities Application Framework V4 the end userid is now propogated to the database using the CLIENT_IDENTIFIER as part of the Oracle JDBC connection API. This not only means that the common database userid is still used but the end user is indentifiable for the duration of the database call. This can be used for monitoring or to hook into Oracle's database security products. This enhancement is only available to Oracle Database customers. Enhanced Security Definitions - Security Administrators use the product browser front end to control access rights of defined users. While this is sufficient for most sites, a new security portal has been introduced to speed up the maintenance of security information. Oracle Identity Manager Integration - With the popularity of Oracle's Identity Management Suite, the Framework now provides an integration adapter and Identity Manager Generic Transport Connector (GTC) to allow users and group membership to be provisioned to any Oracle Utilities Application Framework based product from Oracle's Identity Manager. This is also available for Oracle Utilties Application Framework V2.2 customers. Refer to My Oracle Support KBid 970785.1 - Oracle Identity Manager Integration Overview. Audit On Inquiry - Typically the configurable audit facility in the Oracle Utilities Application Framework is used to audit changes to records. In Oracle Utilities Application Framework the Business Services and Service Scripts could be configured to audit inquiries as well. Now it is possible to attach auditing capabilities to zones on the product (including base package ones). Time Zone Support - In some of the Oracle Utilities Application Framework based products, the timezone of the end user is a factor in the processing. The user object has been extended to allow the recording of time zone information for use in product functionality. JAAS Suport - Internally the Oracle Utilities Application Framework uses a number of techniques to validate and transmit security information across the architecture. These various methods have been reconciled into using Java Authentication and Authorization Services for standardized security. This is strictly an internal change with no direct on how security operates externally. JMX Based Cache Management - In the last bullet point, I mentioned extra security applied to cache management from the browser. Alternatively a JMX based interface is now provided to allow IT operations to control the cache without the browser interface. This JMX capability can be initiated from a JSR120 compliant JMX console or JMX browser. I will be writing another more detailed blog entry on the JMX enhancements as it is quite a change and an exciting direction for the product line. Data Patch Permissions - The database installer provided with the product required lower levels of security for some operations. At some sites they wanted the ability for non-DBA's to execute the utilities in a controlled fashion. The framework now allows feature configuration to allow delegation for patch execution. User Enable Support - At some sites, the use of temporary staff such as contractors is commonplace. In this scenario, temporary security setups were required and used. A potential issue has arisen when the contractor left the company. Typically the IT group would remove the contractor from the security repository to prevent login using that contractors userid but the userid could NOT be removed from the authorization model becuase of audit requirements (if any user in the product updates financials or key data their userid is recorded for audit purposes). It is now possible to effectively diable the user from the security model to prevent any use of the useridwhilst retaining audit information. These are a subset of the security changes in Oracle Utilities Application Framework. More details about the security capabilities of the product is contained in My Oracle Support KB Id 773473.1 - Oracle Utilities Application Framework Security Overview.

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• Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5

  - by pinaldave

  Developer Training - Importance and Significance - Part 1 Developer Training – Employee Morals and Ethics – Part 2 Developer Training – Difficult Questions and Alternative Perspective - Part 3 Developer Training – Various Options for Developer Training – Part 4 Developer Training – A Conclusive Summary- Part 5 We have now reached the end of our series about developer training.  I hope you have come away thinking that training is the best way to advance in your company and that you are looking for training opportunities right now.  If you’re still not convinced here are a few things to keep in mind:  Training benefits the employer and the employee. A well trained employee is a happy employee, and a happy employee is more efficient and productive. Training an employee might be expensive, but it is less expensive than hiring a new person. Whether you are looking at him from the employee’s or the company’s point of view, there are always advantages to training. A Broader View This series is definitely written for Developer Training but it is not limited to developers only. There are IT Pro, System Admins, DBAs as well many other technology professionals; this article series is for all professionals in the world. The concepts and take away will remain common across all the platform and regardless of technology affiliation. Pass the Knowledge If I have to pick one advise which is extremely important related to training, I will pick – pass the knowledge. Once you have decided in favor of training, there is more to it than simply showing up and staying awake.  It is always a good idea to take notes – at the very least it will help you stay awake, but they will often serve as a good way to remember your training when you go back to work.  You can also use them to pass your new knowledge on to fellow employees, which can be very fun and rewarding. Right Place, Right Time and Right Training There are so many ways to get developer training.  In-person and on the job training is easy to come by and is the most usual type of training, but don’t overlook my favorite type of training: On Demand.  Being able to learn at your own pace, own place and on your own time will make training a realistic goal for almost every employee. I can think of nothing more important in life than furthering your education.  Especially when you work in a field that is constantly changing – like technology.  Whether you like it or not, training is incredibly important.  That is why I feel it is so important to receive training.  And because there are so many different training formats – live, online, through books, through people – I am certain that we all can find a way to be trained that best suits our goals and personalities. The Teacher Within If you think of anyone who is a master of the technology field or an incredibly successful developer (the obvious examples that spring to mind are Steve Jobs or Bill Gates), you will also find a teacher.  Both these individuals spent their lives developing better technology, but also educating other developers and the public about how to use these technologies and how it can change your life for the better.  I think that we all should strive to be like these wonderful teachers.  We might not be able to change the world, but we can certainly change a few lives around us. Even if we never turn into trainers ourselves , being trained as a student can be a good exercise.  We learn a lot and become better employees – and it would not be a stretch to say that this makes us better individuals, as well. Final Say I think learning and growing in your chosen field is not only a good idea, career-wise, but can be fun, too!  I for one never feel more alive than when I am learning about something I am really passionate about.  I think my job title – technology evangelist – explains how enthusiastic I am about this subject.  But please don’t think that I am thinking of this as someone who wants to train and educate others (although this is also one of my passions).  I am also a passionate student.  I enjoy learning new things and am always on the lookout for new ways to learn and new people to learn from. Reference: Pinal Dave (http://blog.sqlauthority.com) Filed under: Developer Training, PostADay, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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• Mobile HCM: It’s not the future, it is right now

  - by Natalia Rachelson

  Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE X-NONE /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-priority:99; mso-style-qformat:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif"; mso-ascii- mso-ascii-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-fareast-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-theme-font:minor-fareast; mso-hansi- mso-hansi-theme-font:minor-latin; mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-theme-font:minor-bidi;} A guest post by Steve Boese, Director Product Strategy, Oracle I’ll bet you reached for your iPhone or Android or BlackBerry and took a quick look at email or Facebook or last night’s text messages before you even got out of bed this morning. Come on, admit it, it’s ok, you are among friends here. See, feel better now? But seriously, the incredible growth and near-ubiquity of increasingly powerful, capable, and for many of us, essential in our daily lives mobile devices has profoundly changed the way we communicate, consume information, socialize, and more and more, conduct business and get our work done. And if you doubt that profound change has happened, just think for a moment about the last time you misplaced your iPhone.  The shivers, the cold sweats, the panic... We have all been there. And indeed your personal experiences with mobile technology echoes throughout the world - here are a few data points to consider: Market research firm IDC estimates 1.8 billion mobile phones will be shipped in 2012. A recent Pew study reports 46% of Americans own a smartphone of some kind. And finally in the USA, ownership of tablets like the iPad has doubled from 10% to 19% in the last year. So truly for the Human Resources leader, the question is no longer, ‘Should HR explore ways to exploit mobile devices and their always-on nature to better support and empower the modern workforce?’, but rather ‘How can HR best take advantage of smartphone and tablet capability to provide information, enable transactions, and enhance decision making?’. Because even though moving HCM applications to mobile devices seems inherently logical given today’s fast-moving and mobile workforces, and its promise to deliver incredible value to the organization, HR leaders also have to consider many factors before devising their Mobile HCM strategy and embarking on mobile HR technology projects. Here are just some of the important considerations for HR leaders as you build your strategies and evaluate mobile HCM solutions: Does your organization provide mobile devices to the workforce today, and if so, will the current set of deployed devices have the necessary capability and ecosystems to support your mobile HCM initiatives? Will you allow workers to use or bring their own mobile devices, (commonly abbreviated as ‘BYOD’), and if so are your IT and Security organizations in agreement and capable of supporting that strategy? Do you know which workers need access to mobile HCM applications? Often mobile HCM capability flows down in an organization, with executives and other ‘road-warrior’ types having the most immediate needs, followed by field sales staff, project managers, and even potential job candidates. But just as an organization will have to spend time understanding ‘who’ should have access to mobile HCM technology, the ‘what’ of the way the solutions should be deployed to these groups will also vary. What works and makes sense for the executive, (company-wide dashboards and analytics on an iPad), might not be as relevant for a retail store manager, (employee schedules, location-level sales and inventory data, transaction approvals, etc.). With Oracle Fusion HCM, we are taking an approach to mobile HR that encompasses not just the mobile solution needs for the various types of worker, but also incorporates the fundamental attributes of great mobile applications - the ability to support end-to-end transactions, apps that respond with lightning-fast speed, with functions that are embedded in a worker’s daily activities, and features that can be mashed-up easily with other business areas like Finance and CRM. Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the Oracle Fusion HCM team, delivering mobile experiences that truly enhance, enable, and empower the mobile workforce, and deliver on the design mantras of the best-in-class consumer applications, continues to shape and drive design decisions. Mobile is no longer the future, it is right now, and the cutting-edge HR leader of today will need to consider how mobile fits her HCM technology strategy from here on out. You can learn more about our ideas and plans for Oracle Fusion HCM mobile solutions at https://fusiontap.oracle.com/.

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• What Every Developer Should Know About MSI Components

  - by Alois Kraus

  Hopefully nothing. But if you have to do more than simple XCopy deployment and you need to support updates, upgrades and perhaps side by side scenarios there is no way around MSI. You can create Msi files with a Visual Studio Setup project which is severely limited or you can use the Windows Installer Toolset. I cannot talk about WIX with my German colleagues because WIX has a very special meaning. It is funny to always use the long name when I talk about deployment possibilities. Alternatively you can buy commercial tools which help you to author Msi files but I am not sure how good they are. Given enough pain with existing solutions you can also learn the MSI Apis and create your own packaging solution. If I were you I would use either a commercial visual tool when you do easy deployments or use the free Windows Installer Toolset. Once you know the WIX schema you can create well formed wix xml files easily with any editor. Then you can “compile” from the wxs files your Msi package. Recently I had the “pleasure” to get my hands dirty with C++ (again) and the MSI technology. Installation is a complex topic but after several month of digging into arcane MSI issues I can safely say that there should exist an easier way to install and update files as today. I am not alone with this statement as John Robbins (creator of the cool tool Paraffin) states: “.. It's a brittle and scary API in Windows …”. To help other people struggling with installation issues I present you the advice I (and others) found useful and what will happen if you ignore this advice. What is a MSI file? A MSI file is basically a database with tables which reference each other to control how your un/installation should work. The basic idea is that you declare via these tables what you want to install and MSI controls the how to get your stuff onto or off your machine. Your “stuff” consists usually of files, registry keys, shortcuts and environment variables. Therefore the most important tables are File, Registry, Environment and Shortcut table which define what will be un/installed. The key to master MSI is that every resource (file, registry key ,…) is associated with a MSI component. The actual payload consists of compressed files in the CAB format which can either be embedded into the MSI file or reside beside the MSI file or in a subdirectory below it. To examine MSI files you need Orca a free MSI editor provided by MS. There is also another free editor called Super Orca which does support diffs between MSI and it does not lock the MSI files. But since Orca comes with a shell extension I tend to use only Orca because it is so easy to right click on a MSI file and open it with this tool. How Do I Install It? Double click it. This does work for fresh installations as well as major upgrades. Updates need to be installed via the command line via msiexec /i <msi> REINSTALL=ALL REINSTALLMODE=vomus   This tells the installer to reinstall all already installed features (new features will NOT be installed). The reinstallmode letters do force an overwrite of the old cached package in the %WINDIR%\Installer folder. All files, shortcuts and registry keys are redeployed if they are missing or need to be replaced with a newer version. When things did go really wrong and you want to overwrite everything unconditionally use REINSTALLMODE=vamus. How To Enable MSI Logs? You can download a MSI from Microsoft which installs some registry keys to enable full MSI logging. The log files can be found in your %TEMP% folder and are called MSIxxxx.log. Alternatively you can add to your msiexec command line the option msiexec …. /l*vx <LogFileName> Personally I find it rather strange that * does not mean full logging. To really get all logs I need to add v and x which is documented in the msiexec help but I still find this behavior unintuitive. What are MSI components? The whole MSI logic is bound to the concept of MSI components. Nearly every msi table has a Component column which binds an installable resource to a component. Below are the screenshots of the FeatureComponents and Component table of an example MSI. The Feature table defines basically the feature hierarchy.  To find out what belongs to a feature you need to look at the FeatureComponents table where for each feature the components are listed which will be installed when a feature is installed. The MSI components are defined in the  Component table. This table has as first column the component name and as second column the component id which is a GUID. All resources you want to install belong to a MSI component. Therefore nearly all MSI tables have a Component_ column which contains the component name. If you look e.g. a the File table you see that every file belongs to a component which is true for all other tables which install resources. The component table is the glue between all other tables which contain the resources you want to install. So far so easy. Why is MSI then so complex? Most MSI problems arise from the fact that you did violate a MSI component rule in one or the other way. When you install a feature the reference count for all components belonging to this feature will increase by one. If your component is installed by more than one feature it will get a higher refcount. When you uninstall a feature its refcount will drop by one. Interesting things happen if the component reference count reaches zero: Then all associated resources will be deleted. That looks like a reasonable thing and it is. What it makes complex are the strange component rules you have to follow. Below are some important component rules from the Tao of the Windows Installer … Rule 16: Follow Component Rules Components are a very important part of the Installer technology. They are the means whereby the Installer manages the resources that make up your application. The SDK provides the following guidelines for creating components in your package: Never create two components that install a resource under the same name and target location. If a resource must be duplicated in multiple components, change its name or target location in each component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Two components must not have the same key path file. This is a consequence of the previous rule. The key path value points to a particular file or folder belonging to the component that the installer uses to detect the component. If two components had the same key path file, the installer would be unable to distinguish which component is installed. Two components however may share a key path folder. Do not create a version of a component that is incompatible with all previous versions of the component. This rule should be applied across applications, products, product versions, and companies. Do not create components containing resources that will need to be installed into more than one directory on the user’s system. The installer installs all of the resources in a component into the same directory. It is not possible to install some resources into subdirectories. Do not include more than one COM server per component. If a component contains a COM server, this must be the key path for the component. Do not specify more than one file per component as a target for the Start menu or a Desktop shortcut. … And these rules do not even talk about component ids, update packages and upgrades which you need to understand as well. Lets suppose you install two MSIs (MSI1 and MSI2) which have the same ComponentId but different component names. Both do install the same file. What will happen when you uninstall MSI2?   Hm the file should stay there. But the component names are different. Yes and yes. But MSI uses not use the component name as key for the refcount. Instead the ComponentId column of the Component table which contains a GUID is used as identifier under which the refcount is stored. The components Comp1 and Comp2 are identical from the MSI perspective. After the installation of both MSIs the Component with the Id {100000….} has a refcount of two. After uninstallation of one MSI there is still a refcount of one which drops to zero just as expected when we uninstall the last msi. Then the file which was the same for both MSIs is deleted. You should remember that MSI keeps a refcount across MSIs for components with the same component id. MSI does manage components not the resources you did install. The resources associated with a component are then and only then deleted when the refcount of the component reaches zero.   The dependencies between features, components and resources can be described as relations. m,k are numbers >= 1, n can be 0. Inside a MSI the following relations are valid Feature    1  –> n Components Component    1 –> m Features Component      1  –>  k Resources These relations express that one feature can install several components and features can share components between them. Every (meaningful) component will install at least one resource which means that its name (primary key to stay in database speak) does occur in some other table in the Component column as value which installs some resource. Lets make it clear with an example. We want to install with the feature MainFeature some files a registry key and a shortcut. We can then create components Comp1..3 which are referenced by the resources defined in the corresponding tables.   Feature Component Registry File Shortcuts MainFeature Comp1 RegistryKey1     MainFeature Comp2   File.txt   MainFeature Comp3   File2.txt Shortcut to File2.txt   It is illegal that the same resource is part of more than one component since this would break the refcount mechanism. Lets illustrate this:            Feature ComponentId Resource Reference Count Feature1 {1000-…} File1.txt 1 Feature2 {2000-….} File1.txt 1 The installation part works well but what happens when you uninstall Feature2? Component {20000…} gets a refcount of zero where MSI deletes all resources belonging to this component. In this case File1.txt will be deleted. But Feature1 still has another component {10000…} with a refcount of one which means that the file was deleted too early. You just have ruined your installation. To fix it you then need to click on the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs to let MSI reinstall any missing registry keys, files or shortcuts. The vigilant reader might has noticed that there is more in the Component table. Beside its name and GUID it has also an installation directory, attributes and a KeyPath. The KeyPath is a reference to a file or registry key which is used to detect if the component is already installed. This becomes important when you repair or uninstall a component. To find out if the component is already installed MSI checks if the registry key or file referenced by the KeyPath property does exist. When it does not exist it assumes that it was either already uninstalled (can lead to problems during uninstall) or that it is already installed and all is fine. Why is this detail so important? Lets put all files into one component. The KeyPath should be then one of the files of your component to check if it was installed or not. When your installation becomes corrupt because a file was deleted you cannot repair it with the Repair button under Add/Remove Programs because MSI checks the component integrity via the Resource referenced by its KeyPath. As long as you did not delete the KeyPath file MSI thinks all resources with your component are installed and never executes any repair action. You get even more trouble when you try to remove files during an upgrade (you cannot remove files during an update) from your super component which contains all files. The only way out and therefore best practice is to assign for every resource you want to install an extra component. This ensures painless updatability and repairs and you have much less effort to remove specific files during an upgrade. In effect you get this best practice relation Feature 1  –> n Components Component   1  –>  1 Resources MSI Component Rules Rule 1 – One component per resource Every resource you want to install (file, registry key, value, environment value, shortcut, directory, …) must get its own component which does never change between versions as long as the install location is the same. Penalty If you add more than one resources to a component you will break the repair capability of MSI because the KeyPath is used to check if the component needs repair. MSI ComponentId Files MSI 1.0 {1000} File1-5 MSI 2.0 {2000} File2-5 You want to remove File1 in version 2.0 of your MSI. Since you want to keep the other files you create a new component and add them there. MSI will delete all files if the component refcount of {1000} drops to zero. The files you want to keep are added to the new component {2000}. Ok that does work if your upgrade does uninstall the old MSI first. This will cause the refcount of all previously installed components to reach zero which means that all files present in version 1.0 are deleted. But there is a faster way to perform your upgrade by first installing your new MSI and then remove the old one.  If you choose this upgrade path then you will loose File1-5 after your upgrade and not only File1 as intended by your new component design.   Rule 2 – Only add, never remove resources from a component If you did follow rule 1 you will not need Rule 2. You can add in a patch more resources to one component. That is ok. But you can never remove anything from it. There are tricky ways around that but I do not want to encourage bad component design. Penalty Lets assume you have 2 MSI files which install under the same component one file   MSI1 MSI2 {1000} - ComponentId {1000} – ComponentId File1.txt File2.txt   When you install and uninstall both MSIs you will end up with an installation where either File1 or File2 will be left. Why? It seems that MSI does not store the resources associated with each component in its internal database. Instead Windows will simply query the MSI that is currently uninstalled for all resources belonging to this component. Since it will find only one file and not two it will only uninstall one file. That is the main reason why you never can remove resources from a component!   Rule 3 Never Remove A Component From an Update MSI. This is the same as if you change the GUID of a component by accident for your new update package. The resulting update package will not contain all components from the previously installed package. Penalty When you remove a component from a feature MSI will set the feature state during update to Advertised and log a warning message into its log file when you did enable MSI logging. SELMGR: ComponentId '{2DCEA1BA-3E27-E222-484C-D0D66AEA4F62}' is registered to feature 'xxxxxxx, but is not present in the Component table.  Removal of components from a feature is not supported! MSI (c) (24:44) [07:53:13:436]: SELMGR: Removal of a component from a feature is not supported Advertised means that MSI treats all components of this feature as not installed. As a consequence during uninstall nothing will be removed since it is not installed! This is not only bad because uninstall does no longer work but this feature will also not get the required patches. All other features which have followed component versioning rules for update packages will be updated but the one faulty feature will not. This results in very hard to find bugs why an update was only partially successful. Things got better with Windows Installer 4.5 but you cannot rely on that nobody will use an older installer. It is a good idea to add to your update msiexec call MSIENFORCEUPGRADECOMPONENTRULES=1 which will abort the installation if you did violate this rule.

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• 2010 Collaboration Summit Impressions

  - by Elena Zannoni

  It's a bit late, but there you have it anyway. April 14 to 16 I attended the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in SFO. I was running two tracks, one on tracing and one on tools. You can see the tracks and the slides here: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit/slides I was pretty busy both days, Thursday with a whole day tracing track, Friday with a half day toolchain track. The sessions were well attended, the rooms were full, with people spilling in the hallways. Some new things were presented, like Kernelshark, by Steve Rostedt, a GUI (yes, believe it or not, a GUI) written in GTK. It is very nice, showing a timeline for traced kernel events, and you can zoom in and filter at will. It works on the latest kernels, and it requires some new things/fixes in GTK. I don't recall exactly what version of GTK though. Dominique Toupin from Ericsson presented something about user requirements for tracing. Mostly though about who's who in the embedded world, and eclipse. Masami and Mathieu presented an update on their work. See their slides. The interesting thing to me was of course the new version of uprobes w/o underlying utrace presented by Jim Keniston. At the end of the session we had a discussion about the future of utrace. Roland wasn't there, butTom Tromey (also from RedHat) collected the feedback. Basically we are at a standstill now that utrace has been rejected yet again. There wasn't much advise that anybody could give, except jokingly, we decided that the only way in is to make it a part of perf events. There needs to be another refactoring, but most of all, this "killer app" that would be enabled because of utrace hasn't materialized yet. We think that having a good debugging story on Linux is enough of a killer app, for instance allowing multiple tracers, and not relying on SIGCHLD etc. I think this wasn't completely clear to the kernel community. Trying to achieve debugging via a gdb stub inside the kernel interfacing to utrace and that is controlled via the gdb remote protocol also lost its appeal (thankfully, since the gdb remote protocol is archaic). Somebody would have to be creative in how to submit utrace. It doesn't have to be called utrace (it was really a random choice, for lack of a letter that was not already used in front of the word "trace"). So basically, I think the ideas behind utrace are sound, and the necessity of a new interface is acknowledged. But I believe the integration/submission process with the kernel folks has to restart from scratch, clean slate. We'll see. There are many conferences and meetings coming up in the near future where things can be discussed further. On the second day, Friday, we had the tools talks. It was interesting to observe the more "kernel" oriented people's behavior towards the gcc etc community. The first talk was by Mark Mitchell, about Gcc and its new plugin architecture. After that, Paolo talked about the new C++1x standard, which will be finalized in 2011. Many features are already implemented in the libstdc++ library and gcc and usable today. We had a few minutes (really, the half day track was quite short) where Bradley Kuhn from the Software Freedom Law Center explained the GPLv3 exception for gcc (due to the new gcc plugin architecture and the availability of the intermediate results from the compilation, which is a new thing). I will not try to explain, but basically you cannot take the result of the preprocessing and then use that in your own proprietary compiler. After, we had a talk by Ian Taylor about the new Gold linker. One good thing in that area is that they are trying to make gold the new default linker (for instance Fedora will use gold as the distro linker). However gold is very different from binutils' old linker. It doesn't use a linker script, for instance. The kernel has been linked with gold many times as an exercise (the ground work was done by Kris Van Hees), but this needs to be constantly tested/monitored because the kernel linker script is very complex, and uses esoteric features (Wenji is now monitoring that each kernel RC can be built with gold). It was positive that people are now aware of gold and the need for it to be ported to more architectures. It seems that the porting is very easy, with little arch dependent code. Finally Tom Tromey presented about gdb and the archer project. Archer is a development branch of gdb mostly done by RedHat, where they are focusing on better c++ printing, c++ expression parsing, and plugins. The archer work is merged regularly in the gdb mainline. In general it was a good conference. I did miss most of the first day, because that's when I flew in. But I caught a couple of talks. Nothing earth shattering, except for Google giving each person registered a free Android phone. Yey.

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• Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It – book review

  - by DigiMortal

      How do our users see the products we are writing for them and how happy they are with our work? Are they able to get their work done without fighting with cool features and crashes or are they just switching off resistance part of their brain to survive our software? Yeah, the overall picture of software usability landscape is not very nice. Okay, it is not even nice. But, fortunately, Why Software Sucks...and What You Can Do About It by David S. Platt explains everything. Why Software Sucks… is book for software users but I consider it as a-must reading also for developers and specially for their managers whose politics often kills all usability topics as soon as they may appear. For managers usability is soft topic that can be manipulated the way it is best in current state of project. Although developers are not UI designers and usability experts they are still very often forced to deal with these topics and this is how usability problems start (of course, also designers are able to produce designs that are stupid and too hard to use for users, but this blog here is about development). I found this book to be very interesting and funny reading. It is not humor book but it explains you all so you remember later very well what you just read. It took me about three evenings to go through this book and I am still enjoying what I found and how author explains our weird young working field to end users. I suggest this book to all developers – while you are demanding your management to hire or outsource usability expert you are at least causing less pain to end users. So, go and buy this book, just like I did. And… they thanks to mr. Platt :) There is one book more I suggest you to read if you are interested in usability - Don't Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition by Steve Krug. Editorial review from Amazon Today’s software sucks. There’s no other good way to say it. It’s unsafe, allowing criminal programs to creep through the Internet wires into our very bedrooms. It’s unreliable, crashing when we need it most, wiping out hours or days of work with no way to get it back. And it’s hard to use, requiring large amounts of head-banging to figure out the simplest operations. It’s no secret that software sucks. You know that from personal experience, whether you use computers for work or personal tasks. In this book, programming insider David Platt explains why that’s the case and, more importantly, why it doesn’t have to be that way. And he explains it in plain, jargon-free English that’s a joy to read, using real-world examples with which you’re already familiar. In the end, he suggests what you, as a typical user, without a technical background, can do about this sad state of our software—how you, as an informed consumer, don’t have to take the abuse that bad software dishes out. As you might expect from the book’s title, Dave’s expose is laced with humor—sometimes outrageous, but always dead on. You’ll laugh out loud as you recall incidents with your own software that made you cry. You’ll slap your thigh with the same hand that so often pounded your computer desk and wished it was a bad programmer’s face. But Dave hasn’t written this book just for laughs. He’s written it to give long-overdue voice to your own discovery—that software does, indeed, suck, but it shouldn’t. Table of contents Acknowledgments xiii Introduction Chapter 1: Who’re You Calling a Dummy? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Control versus Ease of Use I Don’t Care How Your Program Works A Bad Feature and a Good One Stopping the Proceedings with Idiocy Testing on Live Animals Where We Are and What You Can Do Chapter 2: Tangled in the Web Where We Came From How It Works Why It Still Sucks Today Client-Centered Design versus Server-Centered Design Where’s My Eye Opener? It’s Obvious—Not! Splash, Flash, and Animation Testing on Live Animals What You Can Do about It Chapter 3: Keep Me Safe The Way It Was Why It Sucks Today What Programmers Need to Know, but Don’t A Human Operation Budgeting for Hassles Users Are Lazy Social Engineering Last Word on Security What You Can Do Chapter 4: Who the Heck Are You? Where We Came From Why It Still Sucks Today Incompatible Requirements OK, So Now What? Chapter 5: Who’re You Looking At? Yes, They Know You Why It Sucks More Than Ever Today Users Don’t Know Where the Risks Are What They Know First Milk You with Cookies? Privacy Policy Nonsense Covering Your Tracks The Google Conundrum Solution Chapter 6: Ten Thousand Geeks, Crazed on Jolt Cola See Them in Their Native Habitat All These Geeks Who Speaks, and When, and about What Selling It The Next Generation of Geeks—Passing It On Chapter 7: Who Are These Crazy Bastards Anyway? Homo Logicus Testosterone Poisoning Control and Contentment Making Models Geeks and Jocks Jargon Brains and Constraints Seven Habits of Geeks Chapter 8: Microsoft: Can’t Live With ’Em and Can’t Live Without ’Em They Run the World Me and Them Where We Came From Why It Sucks Today Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t We Love to Hate Them Plus ça Change Growing-Up Pains What You Can Do about It The Last Word Chapter 9: Doing Something About It 1. Buy 2. Tell 3. Ridicule 4. Trust 5. Organize Epilogue About the Author

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